Literature and Drama Editor Laura Kiely guides us through the complex history of black female writers, from the 18th century to modern day.
“Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train,”
(“On Being Brought from Africa to America”, 1773)
Emerging from the mid-18th century is the unassuming yet powerful voice of a black female slave, a woman named Phillis Wheatley. Born a free person in the Gambia River region of West Africa, Wheatley was captured by slave traders as a child in 1761 and brought to Boston, where she was sold to the Wheatleys. John Wheatley purchased her for his wife Suzannah, and they named her, much to her misfortune, after the slave ship that brought her to America - the Phillis.
Wheatley had an unusual upbringing relative to the plight of most other enslaved people in America, where she received an education in the Wheatley household outside of her “working” hours. After just four years of learning to read and write, she became fully literate in English and soon began learning Greek and Latin, eventually translating works by Homer, Ovid and Virgil.
In her early teen years, she began writing poetry that was stylistically influenced by neoclassical British poets such as Alexander Pope, typically concerned with piety, morality and freedom. While travelling in London in 1773 with the son of her enslaver, she had her collection of poetry published in a book: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. She became the first English-speaking black person in history to publish a book.
The volume includes Wheatley’s most anthologised poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, which is often cited as her only reference to her origin and enslavement. The poem couches a social justice argument, asserting that “Negroes, Black as Cain,” were not inherently inferior to whites in matters of the spirit and thus could “join th’angelic train” as spiritual equals to whites.
Her literary triumphs forced white people to question their deeply entrenched cynicism towards the spiritual and intellectual capacity of the Black people they enslaved. While the classroom teaches Whitman, Dickinson and Poe as the “golden” and “classic” standard, Wheatley’s poetry challenges the Western notion of the classics as being intrinsically and exclusively white.
In the decades that followed, numerous African-American women authors emerged, though many of their works were purely non-fictional, abolitionist slave narratives. Of course, the impetus of 19th-century slave narratives was to illuminate, not just for the citizens of America, but for their counterparts in Europe also, the lived reality of slavery.
Notable writers include Mary Prince (1831) and Harriet Jacobs (1861), whose work served as paramount exercises in educating the broader public about the horrific conditions forced upon enslaved Black people. Prince was the first African-American to have an autobiography published and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl would later be recognised and taught as a specifically female experience of slavery; detailing the ubiquity of sexual violence inflicted upon enslaved Black women.
However, it wasn’t until a century later that the slave narrative was revolutionised by one of the most monumental figures in 20th-century American literature. Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved lucidly acknowledges the cultural psychosis over America towards its own history. The novel is primarily informed by the material conditions of slavery in the antebellum South and functions as a kind of treatise on the impossibility of imagining America without its inheritance of slavery.
Beloved takes on the complex task of representing history through a fictional lens, where Morrison teaches her reader about this barbaric but very real institution through her ostensibly “morally ambiguous” protagonist Sethe, a runaway slave, who saw murdering her children as to set them free, i.e. Free from slavery. This is the story’s kernel, eliciting both bewilderment and sympathy, the reader is forced to engage with the text directly and to question how such a tragedy could transpire. To read Beloved is to be morally implicated in the past, to take that step beyond just passive reading and to engage with the “Sixty Million, and more” lives that were affected by the institution of slavery.
For this literary feat, Morrison was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, a prestigious award that recognises “distinguished fiction”. Nevertheless, her fiction is richly based on historical fact. The character of Sethe was based on a real woman, Margaret Garner (1834-1858), whom Morrison discovered while researching archives for her story. She would be the first African-American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her oeuvre which began in 1970 with her debut novel The Bluest Eye.
This rich literary tradition has thrived well into the 21st century, with notable writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Angie Thomas, and Kiley Reid; all of whom harness their literary prowess to enlighten their readers on the systemic oppression faced by Black women. Kiley Reid’s 2019 novel Such a Fun Age is a demonstrative critique of white fragility (coined by Robin DiAngelo), that satirises the shortcomings of white feminism and the 21st-century obsession with political correctness that prioritises image over meaningful, material change.
The protagonist, Emira, is a 25-year-old Black woman who works as a babysitter for her white employer the Chamberlains, who are painful illustrators of “colour-blindness”, saving themselves from “talking about race in a world that insists that race does not matter.” (DiAngelo, White Fragility, 110)
While the crux of the story centres around an incident in which Emira is publicly accused of kidnapping the child she is paid to look after because of her skin colour, an event that a bystander secretly records and posts online, 21st-century themes of “performative activism”, “woke culture” and white privilege emerge.
As the novel progresses, these themes are dissected and broken down through Emira’s struggle for an authentic voice, ultimately revealing the complicated nuances and ideas we still, as a broader society, have around race, gender and class.
Having narratives from people of colour is essential for imbuing literature with authentic and meaningful perspectives. Narratives are key to understanding the past, and how it has shaped the present, providing critical insight into how we should navigate the future.